NetEqualizer News Blog

The birds outside my office window are restless. I can see the strain in the Comcast cable wires as they droop, heavy with the burden of additional bits, weighting them down like a freak ice storm.   It is time, once again, for Apple to update every device in the Universe with their latest IOS update.

Assuming you are responsible for a Network with a limited Internet pipe, and you are staring down 100 or more users, about to hit the accept button for their update, what can you do to prevent your user network from being gridlocked?

The most obvious option to gravitate to is caching. I found this nice article (thanks Luke) on the Squid settings used for a previous iOS update in 2013.  Having worked with Squid quite a bit helping our customers, I was not surprised on the amount of tuning required to get this to work, and I suspect there will be additional changes to make it work in 2014.

If you have a Squid caching solution already up and running it is worth a try, but I am on the fence of recommending a Squid install from scratch.  Why? Because we are seeing diminishing returns from Squid caching each year due to the amount of dynamic content.  Translation: Very few things on the Internet come from the same place with the same filename anymore, and for many content providers they are marking much of their content as non-cacheable.

If you have a NetEqualizer in place you can easily blunt the effects of the data crunch with a standard default set-up. The NetEqualizer will automatically push the updates out further into time, especially during peak hours when there is contention. This will allow other applications on your network to function normally during the day. I doubt anybody doing the update will notice the difference.

Finally if you are desperate, you might be able to block access to anything IOS update on your firewall.  This might seem a bit harsh, but then again Apple did not consult with you, and besides isn’t that what the free Internet at Starbucks is for?

Here is a snippet pulled from a forum on how to block it.

iOS devices check for new versions by polling the server mesu.apple.com. This is done via HTTP, port 80. Specifically, the URL is:

http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml

If you block or redirect mesu.apple.com, you will inhibit the check for software updates. If you are really ambitious, you could redirect the query to a cached copy of the XML, but I haven’t tried that. Please remove the block soon; you wouldn’t want to prevent those security updates, would you?